I do not want to use an HTTP proxy in Epiphany (normal non-torified browsing).

I do not want to use an HTTP proxy in Rhythmbox either. No need to tunnel all the Creative Commons podcasts and music I listen to through Tor.

Now guess what happens when I disable the HTTP proxy in Epiphany. It's disabled in Galeon, too. Enable it in Galeon, and Rhythmbox will use the proxy (thus slowing down huge downloads for no reason). Aargh.

Is it really so hard to have per-application settings? I mean, this isn't exactly rocket-science, right?

And yes, I do want to use all those applications at the same time. And no, I do not run a full GNOME desktop environment (I use IceWM, thanks), so I don't care about any GNOME-Desktop-Foo solutions — I just want each of those freaking applications to have their own settings.

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I use torbutton for tor+privoxy in FF for the moments I want to browse anonymous. Since KDE has a global on-off setting too, I cannot use konqueror for anonymous browsing without making the podcasts in amarok really slow too, without pulling all my feeds every hour trough the proxy too.

It makes sense to have global settings. but it makes more sense when all the apps take this global setting only as default, yet have the ability to override it.

It's just the same in KDE :-)
That's why I use firefox for non-Tor browsing, konquerer for Tor-browsing and mplayer (command line version) for stream listening. mplayers use of Tor can easily be toggled with tor_aliases and Tor_disable then.

Why can't an application have some section that overrides the default behavior? I can think of one example off the top of my head. In eclipse you have default workbench configurations, and you can override them in each project however you like.

As for a solution, I haven't seen anything particularly useful. I would think it should be possible to create a separate gconf directory for Galeon and when you run it, provide that directory in the command or through the environment. I'm not interested in solving it enough to go digging through to see if that's possible. A cursory google search didn't turn up anything.

A solution that I believe will work is to run Galeon as a different user. Definitely not ideal, but perhaps more convenient than needing to change the proxy each time. If you change your launcher to launch it as the other user, it should be fairly convenient after the initial setup.

Exactly. Just about any UNIX application usually has overridable defaults. E.g. /etc/foorc can be overridden by ~/.foorc. Why can't the GNOME/KDE stuff provide a similar method to do this?

Sure, there are many hacks to "solve" the problem (different browsers, different users, heck, you could even run different virtualized environments to have separate settings, e.g. using QEMU, XEN, whatever). All of this is an ugly, ugly hack, though...